Trust has long been valued as evidence of character and reliability of an entity, such as an individual, an organization, a company, or a government. However, due to the distributed nature of the Internet and the at least semi-anonymity of entities on the Internet, it has historically been difficult to evaluate whether an entity is trustworthy in an online environment. Furthermore, different websites may use different metrics for evaluating the trust of an individual. Therefore, it may be difficult to compare trust evaluations of an individual from different websites. Additionally, if an entity seeks to establish a trust relationship with a new website, the entity may be forced to essentially start from scratch at the new website because different websites do not typically share trust data (e.g., because of privacy concerns).
Accordingly, this patent application relates to improved techniques for determining trustworthiness in an online environment.